Political Dystopian

Nelson, Michelle, and their family have made it to the farm, having narrowly avoided detainment. Along with their circle of friends, they quickly set about reinforcing their home for the inevitable outbreak of the next civil war. While the corrupt American government hunts down free Americans, the family is caught in the line of fire. Forced to choose between fight and flight, the Patriots Reborn must risk everything to survive in a world filled with chaos. In this new world, no one is safe.

Exiled from Washington after a covert operation gone wrong, Diana is building a new life as a freelance spy, though her obsessive secrecy is driving away the few friends and allies she can count on. When she’s hired to investigate the world’s leading techno capitalist, she unknowingly accepts an assignment with a dark ulterior purpose. Navigating a labyrinth of cutouts and false fronts, Diana discovers a plot to nationalize the global feed.

Labels are what started the war, in the first place. The country was in turmoil. After a few years of recovery and growth from one of the greatest economic crashes in their history, the electoral college elected a president full of hate and fervor, much to the chagrin of the country's populous.

Is being a part of the "herd" really a good thing? In Ayn Rand's Anthem, we join our protagonist in this dystopian future world where humankind's compulsion to seek and live in the "safety of numbers" can go horribly wrong. Anthem was published in 1938 but is scarily relevant to our modern world.

In her job as a congressional aid, Jessie had met all kinds of people, but until recently, they had all been human. Cogs were not human, but they looked like us and talked like us, and this presented Jessie with a mystery. There were questions she simply had to know the answers to. Who invented these artificial people? How and why? And how did they get so human? When Jessie got to know them better, she learned that cogs had real emotions and real personalities.

In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, humankind has entered a dark age at some point in the unspecified future. Individuality is no longer permitted, and people are assigned roles to fulfill in their lives. The work's protagonist, Equality 7-2521, is given an undesirable job as a punishment for thinking for himself and desiring to become a scientist instead. The novella outlines his journey as he starts to commit more “crimes” against society, such as desiring a companion of his own choosing, discovering electricity, and ultimately fleeing from his leaders.

As today’s society edges closer and closer to full-fledged collectivism; as the rights and dignity of the individual continue to be trampled underfoot in the name of “the collective good;” as more and more people refuse to study the history and logical conclusions of their beliefs, and claim that re-branding socialism wipes away its entire shameful and often bloody history, while simultaneously refusing to believe the massive amount of evidence of that history - the work of Ayn Rand is more crucial and relevant than ever.

Technological advancement is now carefully planned, and the concept of individuality has been eliminated. A young man known as Equality 7-2521 rebels by doing secret scientific research. When his activity is discovered, he flees into the wilderness with the girl he loves. Together, they plan to establish a new society based on rediscovered individualism.

The classic dystopian novella, Anthem, is one of the earliest books to explore a theme which has become a standard motif in science fiction literature: the search for individualistic expression in a repressive and rigorously organized society.

October 15, 2016: Hillary died in her sleep today. I was smoking a fat Cohiba when I heard the news. We were still talking about Hillary a couple hours later when we heard a rumbling and went outside to West Broadway. A great throng of Bernies was moving toward us from Prince Street. The crowd grew as we watched, swollen by new Bernies as it moved. An ad hoc Bernie rally. Someone carried a large effigy of Bernie’s hoary head before it. I saw something red and realized it was a red flag, the universal banner of revolution, unfurled by revolutionaries since the Middle Ages.